Disalienation : politics, philosophy, and radical psychiatry in postwar France / Camille Robcis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Robcis, Camille, author.

Series:

Chicago studies in practices of meaning

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Psychotherapy--France--History--20th century.

Psychotherapy.

Psychiatry--Political aspects--France.

Psychiatry.

Psychiatry--Philosophy--History--20th century.

Intellectual life.

Psychiatry--Philosophy.

Psychiatry--Political aspects.

History.

France--Intellectual life--20th century.

France.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

x, 220 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Other Title:

Politics, philosophy, and radical psychiatry in postwar France

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Summary:

"From 1940 to 1945, forty thousand patients died in French psychiatric hospitals. The Vichy Regime's "soft extermination" let patients die of cold, starvation, or lack of care. Yet, in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a small village in central France, one psychiatric hospital attempted to resist. Hoarding food with the help of the population, the staff not only worked to keep patients alive but began to rethink the practical and theoretical bases of psychiatric care. The movement that began at Saint-Alban and came to be known as "institutional psychotherapy" would go on to have a profound influence on postwar French thought.Though the movement was varied, and the point was never to devise a dogma or a model that could be applied indiscriminately, institutional psychotherapy did attempt to offer an "ethics," or a practice of everyday life. Among its most important principles were the belief that theory and practice were inextricably linked, and that psychiatric practice was explicitly political. Camille Robcis traces the history of institutional psychotherapy from its inception to its various transformations between 1945 and 1975. Each chapter of the book is organized around a thinker who was either at Saint-Alban or who engaged with institutional psychotherapy: from François Tosquelles, Franz Fanon, Jean Oury and Félix Guattari, to Michel Foucault. They made up a fascinating constellation within which unexpected relationships between characters, contexts, and ideas--often seemingly fragmentary of tangential--emerged"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction : a politics of madness

François Tosquelles, Saint-Alban and the invention of institutional psychotherapy

Frantz Fanon, the pathologies of freedom, and the decolonization of institutional psychotherapy

Félix Guattari, La Borde, and the search for anti-oedipal politics

Michel Foucault, psychiatry, antipsychiatry, and power

Epilogue : the hospital as a laboratory of political invention.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

ebook version :

ISBN:

9780226777603

022677760X

9780226777740

022677774X

OCLC:

1199330604

Publisher Number:

99987600230